Keys To Talking Politics To Difficult People

Keys to talking to difficult people 1. find common values a. care for children b. safe neighborhoods c. compassion for the working man d. honest government e. the declaration of independence i. equality ii. rights 1. life 2. liberty 3. pursuit of happiness 4. government by consent of governed 5. right to protest for change We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

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preamble to the constitution

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. i. justice ii. Security iii. Common defense iv. General welfare v. Liberty for ourselves and our children g. From Jerry Feldman” [Framing Shop is Open ] i. Notice two aspects of these narratives in the video: their focus on problem solving over party and their emphasis on short-term change in political behavior as a risk worth taking to begin driving government in a better direction. ii. risk missing an opportunity to move an important project forward. And to make this kind offer successful, it must be tied to in truly pragmatic, truly urgent challenges. iii. young man who confesses to being 'pro-life,' but who put that issue aside for the 2008 election. What kinds of projects move a person with such deep religiouis commitments to put aside a key issue--temporarily--

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in order to vote for a Obama? He does not say, but I suspect they are global warming, healthcare, poverty, retirement, Iraq, the housing market. iv. Instead, we allow our civic debate to be dominated by interests who benefit more from projects that fail than from projects that succeed. Lead with values: Choose YOUR issue to lead upon KNOW their language and have your language already set Jim Willis: a. if you are a believer, engage believers in their own language b. if you are not, be respectful of their beliefs, link the fundamental call for human decency and compassion to your ideas. All believers claim these ideals as a minimum standard. c. My favorite line from the Christian testament: i. “by their fruits you shall know them” – in plain language, what you value, what you believe is revealed by what you actually do, by the impact of your choices in the world. seven crucial intellectual moves [ Lakoff] a. first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent i. This separation between values and programs lies behind the president’s pledge to cut programs that don’t serve those values and support those that do — no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President’s idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? — not what political interests? b. Progressive Values are American Values i. Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy —- putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better—what Obama has called an “ethic of excellence” toward creating “a more perfect union” politically. ii. Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be “our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper”—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world. iii. The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality — for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws. iv. he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move. v. Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free

market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely selfinterested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world. vi. Empathy: “the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child…” Responsibility to ourselves and others: “We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world.” The ethic of excellence: “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task.” They define our democracy: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed.” vii. And to religion as well: By quoting language like “our brother’s keeper,” he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better is required. c. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship 1. biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values -- at least on certain issues. Most “conservatives” are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called “partial progressives” sharing Obama’s American values on many issues. Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values. 2. Biconceptualism is central to Obama’s attempts to achieve unity —a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work. 3. But hardcore movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less biconceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hardcore movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks. They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Rush Limbaugh even greater power.

4. Biconceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure biconceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through biconceptualism. d. Protection and Empowerment 1. The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the President’s understanding of government—“not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This depends on what “works” means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation. 2. The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors. 3. Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about: it includes education and other forms of infrastructure—roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package. Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn’t been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation’s productivity for many years. 4. This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties, and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That’s what “works” means —“whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” e. Morality and Economics Fit Together 1. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do. f. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk

1. Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral—and economic—values is fallacious. 2. Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual shortterm self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis. 3. With systemic causation goes systemic risk. The old rational actor model taught in economics and political science ignored systemic risk. Risk was seen as local and governed by direct causation, that is, buy short-term individual decisions. The investment banks acted on their own short-term risk, based on short-term assumptions, for example, that housing prices would continue to rise or that bundles of mortgages once secure for the short term would continue to be “secure” and could be traded as “securities.” 4. The systemic nature of ecological and economic causation and risk have resulted in the twin disasters of global warming and global economic breakdown. Both must be dealt with on a systematic, global, long-term basis. Regulating risk is global and long-term, and so what are required are world-wide institutions that carry out that regulation in systematic way and that monitor causation and risk systemically, not just locally. g. Concepts and Patriotic Language i. As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is “contested.” Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other. ii. For forty years, from the late 1960’s through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country. iii. “Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts

to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration. 7. The message machine: a. The president and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources. It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on. If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity. That will make the president’s vision that much harder to carry out. b. The president hasn’t fooled the radical ideological conservatives in Congress. They know progressive values when they see them — and they see them in their own colleagues and constituents too often for comfort. The radical conservatives are aware that this economic crisis threatens not only their political support, but the very underpinnings of conservative ideology itself. Nonetheless, their brains have not been changed by facts. Movement conservatives are not fading away. They think their conservative values are the real American values. They still have their message machine and they are going to make the most of it. The ratings for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are rising. Without a countervailing communications system on the Democratic side, they can create a lot of trouble, not just for the president, not just for the nation, but on a global scale, for the environmental and economic future of the world.